Am I alone in never having heard of Charlotte Leslie before now? According to my European electioneering husband James Cracknell, who recently met the Bristol Tory, she is a “bloody good constituency MP who works really hard” – but, as of this week, she is also “the blonde MP in the Baywatch swimsuit”.

My feminist hackles were raised as I heard that she’d recreated a photo that dated back to her days as a lifeguard. Leslie, now 35, posed once more in her red swimsuit in an effort, so it went, to raise awareness of lifesaving on Britain’s coasts. Why, oh why, I thought, do women have to flash some flesh in order to get noticed in politics? Where are all the male MPs squeezing their assets into a pair of Speedos just to make their name appear higher up in a Google search for a few days?

But then I actually saw the photos, juxtaposed as a sort of “Before” and “After” from 1999 and the present day. There is Charlotte at 20, a bronzed vision in red, hamming it up for the camera with her steely glare and life-saving equipment, poised to dive beneath the Cornish waves and rescue the holidaymakers of Bude.

And there she is today: the hair is a little more Clare Balding, but the make-up-free prettiness remains, and she’s clearly stayed fit and healthy despite the demands of Westminster. The attitude has waned and, yes, initially, the creaky Portishead Lido looks a fitting backdrop to a tired political game of publicity-seeking stunts. But I defy you not to be intrigued.

It turns out that Charlotte read Classics at Balliol, Oxford, and worked on the BBC’s The Weakest Link and The Holiday Programme. Her first foray into politics was in co-authoring a report, More Good School Places, which first made the case for the Government’s “pupil premium” idea. A spell as special adviser to the then shadow education secretary, David Willetts, followed, and in 2010 she became one of the youngest MPs in Parliament, aged 31.

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Rather wonderfully, Charlotte has described arriving in Westminster as like a “Weird Machiavellian Freshers Week”, criticised whips for “bully[ing] the workforce” and bemoaned production-line politics (“You can feel like a sheep going through a sheep dip. I can see why people don’t like politicians and I am one!”)

But swimsuits were never far away. Charlotte spent her summers as a scarlet-suited lifeguard on the beaches of Cornwall. As a youngster, she trained with the City of Bristol team, making the national backstroke finals after her coach told her she wouldn’t: “He was clever. I never took kindly to being told I couldn’t do something and it had the right effect.” It runs in the family: last year, her mother Jane, at 64, won the World Triathlon Championships for her age group.

Her daughter is certainly not someone who has been made to wear a swimsuit by a political puppeteer. Indeed, given how many hours she has spent ploughing up and down a pool, she will have felt completely at home in tight red Lycra, more workwear than fashion shoot. And, even if vanity did play a part, who’d blame her for feeling a little triumphant in proving she can still rock a 15-year-old look in public? Few women don’t know the secret smugness of squeezing into a long-discarded pair of jeans.

What’s more, for local female MPs, the line between titillation and dissemination is fine. Getting a message across to a wide audience is a challenge and they must use all the tools in their locker – even if that means digging out that same swimsuit after more than a decade to talk about the importance of life-saving clubs, and inadvertently revealing that your thighs have barely changed.

If she ends up as prime minister, that latest photo may come back to bite her on her lovely bottom. But in the meantime, we should be grateful that it’s brought a cracking female MP to our closer attention.